turn list of letters into an array of integers

[Chris Rebert]

On Wed, Oct 24, 2012 at 9:27 PM, seektime <michael.j.krause at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tuesday, October 23, 2012 11:07:29 PM UTC-7, Chris Rebert wrote:
<snip>
>> P.S.: I'm guessing you obtained `L` from file.readlines() or similar;
>> it is worth noting for future reference that the readlines() method is
>> considered somewhat deprecated.
>
> Thanks to everyone lots of great comments are actionable suggestions.
>
> My intension is to used the numpy/scipy packages to solve the task at hand. I agree that there's no point in loading a file into a format which only needs to be converted right after loading. But I'm new to Python the f.readline(s) command, according to the 2.7.3 tutorial and manual, is pretty much all there is for file i/o. If, as you indicated, f.readlines() is deprecated then what should I use instead? I'm using ver. 2.6 on Linux (it's a bit dated, I know).

Just iterate over the file directly using a for-loop (e.g. `for line
in some_file:`). Each iteration yields one line of the file. I used a
very minor variation of this approach in my code (a list comprehension
is just syntax sugar for a for-loop).

Cheers,
Chris